There are questions in politics that become extraordinarily complicated.
This is not one of them.
At least, it shouldn't be.
The question is:
What actually is a woman?
Not what rights should women have.
Not whether transgender people should be treated with dignity.
Not what the law should say.
Not whether a particular person should be allowed into a particular space.
Not whether someone is a good or bad person.
Those are separate questions.
Before we can sensibly discuss any of them, we have to establish what the word woman actually means.
And that turns out to be considerably more interesting than it first appears.
The obvious answer
The conventional dictionary definition is remarkably straightforward.
Oxford defines woman as:
"an adult female human."
The Oxford English Dictionary likewise records woman as referring to an adult female human being.
On this definition, the structure is simple:
Human → female → adult → woman.
A female child is a girl.
An adult female is a woman.
A male child is a boy.
An adult male is a man.
There is no reference to personality, behaviour, clothing, social roles, self-perception or personal identity.
The definition is biological.
And there is an obvious reason why this definition has historically been so intuitive: female itself is a biological category. Oxford defines female in biological terms as belonging to the sex associated with producing eggs or, in humans, the female reproductive pathway.
So if woman = adult human female, the answer to our question is essentially settled.
But contemporary discussions of gender introduce another possibility.
Perhaps woman does not refer to biological sex at all.
Perhaps it refers to gender.
And now we have a problem.
Sex and gender
The modern distinction between sex and gender is not simply a political slogan.
The World Health Organization explicitly distinguishes the two.
According to the WHO, sex refers to biological and physiological characteristics associated with females, males and intersex people, including chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy.
Gender, by contrast, refers to socially constructed characteristics, including norms, behaviours and roles associated with women, men, girls and boys. The WHO explicitly states that gender and sex are related but different.
The American Psychological Association makes a similar distinction. Its current dictionary defines gender in terms of socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes, while distinguishing sex as biological status.
So we now have at least three concepts:
Sex — biological characteristics.
Gender — social and cultural characteristics associated with sex.
Gender identity — a person's internal sense of their gender.
The WHO explicitly distinguishes gender identity from both sex and gender. It describes gender identity as an individual's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with their physiology or sex assigned at birth.
The APA similarly describes gender identity as an internal sense of being male, female or something else.
And this is where the apparently simple question becomes philosophically interesting.
Because if woman means adult human female, then woman is fundamentally a sex category.
If woman means a particular gender identity, then woman is fundamentally a gender category.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
So which one is it?
Let's take the two propositions seriously.
Proposition One
A woman is an adult human female.
On this definition, woman is a biological category.
Being a woman depends upon belonging to the female sex and being an adult human.
Your personality does not determine whether you are a woman.
Your clothing does not determine whether you are a woman.
Your hobbies do not determine whether you are a woman.
Your occupation does not determine whether you are a woman.
Your behaviour does not determine whether you are a woman.
And your subjective feelings about yourself do not determine whether you are a woman.
A woman can be masculine.
A woman can hate dresses.
A woman can have short hair.
A woman can have traditionally male interests.
A woman can be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or asexual.
None of these characteristics changes her sex.
The definition is therefore relatively stable across cultures.
What counts as feminine may change enormously.
What counts as female does not change simply because cultural expectations change.
Proposition Two
Now consider the alternative:
A woman is someone whose gender identity is woman.
This produces a very different category.
It does not necessarily require female biology.
The APA, for example, describes gender identity as an internal sense of being male, female or something else, and notes that it may differ from sex assigned at birth.
Under this framework, a person can be male in biological terms while identifying as a woman in terms of gender identity.
That gives us two propositions which can both be expressed quite clearly:
Woman = adult human female.
and
Woman = person whose gender identity is woman.
The disagreement is therefore not merely about someone's feelings.
It is about which category the word "woman" denotes.
The category problem
This is where I think much of the public argument becomes confused.
We routinely move between several different words as though they were synonyms:
female
woman
sex
gender
gender identity
But they are not necessarily synonyms.
Indeed, the WHO explicitly says that sex, gender and gender identity are distinct concepts.
Consider an ordinary example.
A female person may be:
- feminine,
- masculine,
- gender-nonconforming,
- conventionally feminine,
- conventionally masculine.
None of those descriptions changes her sex.
Likewise, someone may have a particular gender identity without possessing the biological characteristics conventionally associated with that sex.
So if sex and gender are distinct, we cannot simply assume that female and woman must always be interchangeable.
But there is another problem.
If we separate woman from female, we have to explain what woman actually means.
And that question cannot simply be answered:
"A woman is someone who identifies as a woman."
Because that immediately raises another question:
What is a woman?
The circular definition
This is perhaps the simplest philosophical test of the gender-identity definition.
Suppose I ask:
What is a woman?
And the answer is:
Someone who identifies as a woman.
I can then reasonably ask:
What does it mean to identify as a woman?
If the answer is:
To identify as a woman is to have a gender identity of woman.
I can ask:
And what is the gender identity of woman?
If the answer ultimately reduces to:
The feeling that one is a woman.
then we have not yet explained what woman means.
We have described someone's relationship to the word without defining the category to which the word refers.
This does not prove that gender identity is meaningless.
It doesn't.
A person can certainly have a deeply held understanding of themselves in relation to gender. The APA and WHO both recognize gender identity as a distinct concept.
But recognizing that a concept exists is not the same thing as establishing that the concept provides a non-circular definition of another word.
That distinction matters.
Perhaps "woman" is a social category
There is another possibility.
Perhaps woman is neither exclusively biological nor merely a matter of individual identity.
Perhaps it is a social category.
This is where the concept of gender becomes particularly important.
The WHO describes gender as socially constructed norms, behaviours and roles associated with women, men, girls and boys. It also notes that these vary between societies and can change over time.
The APA similarly describes gender in terms of social, cultural and behavioural characteristics.
That gives us a third possibility:
A woman is a person who occupies a particular social or gender category associated with women.
But again, the philosophical question remains:
What determines membership of that category?
Is it behaviour?
Social recognition?
Self-identification?
Appearance?
Sex?
A combination?
And if gender is constructed from social expectations, what happens to women who reject those expectations?
A woman who rejects feminine clothing is still a woman.
A woman who refuses traditional female roles is still a woman.
A woman who is masculine is still a woman.
A woman who rejects every conventional stereotype associated with women is still a woman.
That seems important because it suggests that gender stereotypes cannot themselves be the definition of woman.
If being a woman required behaving femininely, then feminism's rejection of restrictive female stereotypes would create a strange problem: the less stereotypically feminine a woman becomes, the less clearly she qualifies as a woman.
That cannot be the whole story.
Gender identity is not gender expression
There is another distinction worth making.
Someone's gender identity is not necessarily the same thing as their gender expression.
The APA distinguishes gender identity from gender expression, with gender expression referring to things such as clothing, appearance and behaviour through which someone communicates aspects of gender identity.
This matters because it prevents a particularly bad argument:
"You dress like a woman, therefore you are a woman."
That doesn't follow.
A man can wear a dress.
A woman can wear a suit.
Neither garment determines biological sex.
Likewise, neither hairstyle, mannerism, occupation nor personality establishes whether someone is biologically male or female.
So if woman is a gender category, it cannot simply mean "someone who behaves in a stereotypically feminine way."
The category has to be doing something more sophisticated.
What about biological exceptions?
At this point, someone will reasonably raise intersex conditions.
This is an important consideration, and it should not simply be ignored.
Human sex development is biologically complex. The WHO recognizes variations in sex characteristics, which it describes under the umbrella term intersex.
The existence of intersex people does not, however, automatically demonstrate that biological sex is meaningless.
The existence of exceptions does not necessarily destroy a category.
Human biology contains variation throughout.
The existence of infertility does not eliminate the distinction between male and female reproductive systems.
The existence of atypical chromosomal patterns does not make chromosomes irrelevant.
The existence of people with differences of sex development means that biological sex characteristics can sometimes be atypical or do not all align neatly.
The National Academies describes sex as a multidimensional construct involving anatomical and physiological traits including external genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, gonads, chromosomes and hormones, while noting that these traits do not align perfectly for every person.
That is a complication.
It is not necessarily a refutation.
In fact, it illustrates something important:
A biological category can be real without every individual displaying every characteristic associated with it.
The reproductive question
There is another way of approaching sex that avoids the simplistic idea that chromosomes alone determine everything.
What distinguishes male and female organisms biologically is fundamentally connected to reproduction.
The two sexes are organized around different reproductive roles.
In humans, females have the reproductive organization associated with producing ova; males have the reproductive organization associated with producing sperm.
Individuals can of course be infertile.
A woman who has had a hysterectomy remains a woman.
A woman who has never menstruated remains a woman.
A post-menopausal woman remains a woman.
Infertility does not change someone's sex.
This is useful because it demonstrates that biological categories do not necessarily depend upon an individual's ability to perform the characteristic function at a particular moment.
A sterile female is still female.
A woman who cannot become pregnant is still a woman.
The category concerns the underlying biological organization, not whether a particular individual can successfully reproduce.
But then what does gender add?
This is perhaps the most interesting question in the entire debate.
If sex already gives us male and female, what work is gender doing?
The answer offered by contemporary psychology and public-health organizations is that gender describes social and psychological dimensions associated with sex.
The WHO describes gender in terms of socially constructed norms, roles and behaviours, while the APA similarly describes social, cultural and behavioural aspects of gender.
That seems perfectly coherent.
There can be:
female sex
and
social expectations associated with women.
Those aren't the same thing.
A society can have ideas about what women should wear, how women should behave, what occupations women should pursue, how women should speak and what responsibilities women should have.
Those ideas can change.
Indeed, they obviously have changed.
Women wearing trousers was once controversial in Britain.
Women entering professions once dominated by men was controversial.
Women voting was controversial.
Those changes demonstrate something important:
The social meaning attached to being female can change without the biological category changing.
That is precisely the distinction between sex and gender.
So what is a woman?
We have now arrived at the central question again.
There are several possible answers.
Biological definition
A woman is an adult human female.
This is concise, non-circular and grounded in biological sex.
Gender-identity definition
A woman is someone whose gender identity is woman.
This treats woman as a gender category rather than a biological sex category.
Social-category definition
A woman is someone who occupies the social category associated with women.
This places the emphasis on social roles and recognition.
Each definition is trying to answer a slightly different question.
And perhaps that is the heart of the problem.
Are we arguing about one word or several concepts?
Suppose I say:
"Women are biologically female."
And someone responds:
"Gender is not the same as biological sex."
They may both be correct.
The first statement is about sex.
The second is about gender.
The disagreement only appears when we assume that woman must refer exclusively to one or the other.
Likewise, suppose someone says:
"A transgender woman is a woman."
That statement may be perfectly coherent if "woman" is being used as a gender category.
But if someone else is using woman to mean adult human female, then the two people are using the same word to denote different categories.
At that point, arguing about the conclusion without first establishing the definition is almost guaranteed to go nowhere.
It becomes a semantic collision disguised as a moral argument.
And this is where the debate becomes politically explosive
The distinction matters because a great many political arguments use the word woman as though it has one universally agreed meaning.
But different arguments may depend upon different meanings.
When discussing reproduction, pregnancy or female reproductive biology, female sex is obviously relevant.
When discussing social expectations, gender roles or gender identity, gender may be the relevant concept.
When discussing a person's subjective experience of themselves, gender identity may be the relevant concept.
The mistake is not necessarily using any one of these concepts.
The mistake is silently switching between them.
If woman means biological sex in one sentence and gender identity in the next, an argument can appear logically coherent while its underlying category has changed.
That is the conceptual problem I am interested in.
Not whether one side is compassionate and the other hateful.
Not whether one side is enlightened and the other backward.
Not whether one side has better politics.
Before all of that:
What are we actually talking about?
The uncomfortable conclusion
I began with what appears to be a very simple question:
What actually is a woman?
The traditional answer is straightforward:
An adult human female.
Contemporary medical and psychological terminology introduces additional concepts: sex, gender, gender identity and gender expression. Major institutions such as the WHO and APA explicitly distinguish these concepts rather than treating them as interchangeable.
That creates a genuine philosophical question.
If woman means adult human female, then woman is a biological category.
If woman means a gender identity, then woman is a psychological and social category.
If woman means a social role, then it is a social category.
Perhaps all three usages exist.
But if they do, we should be honest about that.
Because we cannot resolve an argument simply by declaring that one definition is morally superior to another.
First we need to know which definition we are using.
And perhaps the deepest problem with the question is therefore not that the answer is complicated.
It is that we have begun using one word to perform several different conceptual jobs.
Female is not the same concept as feminine.
Sex is not the same concept as gender.
Gender is not the same concept as gender identity.
Gender expression is not the same concept as gender identity.
And therefore, before asking what society should do with the category of woman, we should be capable of answering a much more basic question:
What, exactly, do we mean when we say "woman"?
That is where the argument should begin.
Not with the conclusion.
With the definition.
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